British and American Representations of 9-11

by Oana-Celia Gheorghiu

  Nonetheless, including Said’s work within the theoretical background of this study is justified not by its main, politicised statement, that Orientalism is ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient’ (2003, 3), but rather by other dominant aspects. On the one hand, Said’s discussion of imaginative geography and history suits the leitmotif of this work—that the products of the cultural sphere are representation , not factuality. On the other hand, discussing otherness from the particular perspective of the apparently incongruent pair Islam—West , Said’s concern with the Middle East proves to be a useful starting point in the identification of the most frequently encountered stereotypes of the Muslim Arab . As a necessary aside, Said was criticised by Bernard Lewis (1994, 107) for overlapping the Middle East with the entire Oriental world: ‘[h]is Orient is reduced to the Middle East, and his Middle East to a part of the Arab world’. Therefore, the following discussion of Orientalism disregards, for the most part, its many postcolonialist implications, and focuses on what the Palestinian author calls ‘contemporary Orientalist attitudes [which] flood the press and the popular mind’ (2003, 108), namely on the stereotypical depiction of this ultimate Other , as imagined by the contemporary Western mindset.

  The Orient as a Western Construct

  Otherness needs a face. Perhaps not the same every time, but one always easy to identify by virtue of a few criteria of which race, ethnicity, language, customs and religion are the most visible and obvious. Added to these, there is a millennial history of conflict, a threat which is neither discourse , nor representation , but stark fact. For all his determination to shame the West for creating a distorted and mythicised image of the Oriental Other from its alleged position of power , of intellectual and racial superiority, Edward Said notes:Not for nothing did Islam come to symbolize terror , devastation, the demonic, hordes of hated barbarians. For Europe, Islam was a lasting trauma. Until the end of the seventeenth century the ‘Ottoman peril’ lurked alongside Europe to represent for the whole of Christian civilization a constant danger, and in time European civilization incorporated that peril and its lore, its great events, figures, virtues, and vices, as something woven into the fabric of life. (2003, 59–60, emphasis added)

  Although Said’s reduction of the Orient to the Islamic world is historically inaccurate, a criticism which has been repeatedly levelled at his work (see Lewis 1994; Pipes 1979; Irwin 2006; Warraq 2007; al-Azm 1981, and others)—inasmuch as condensing the Occident to Britain and France is equally misleading—the present discussion also embraces this ‘imaginative geography’ in its search for the Western stereotyping of the Eastern Other, in order to avoid widening the scope of the research too much. Said claims that Europeans have constantly made the Manichean distinction between the good and the bad Oriental: ‘the ‘good’ Orient was invariably a classical period somewhere in a long-gone India, whereas the ‘bad’ Orient lingered in present-day Asia, parts of North Africa, and Islam everywhere’ (2003, 99).

  Some commentaries on Said’s division seem necessary, although his contention is generally correct. Indeed, the West tends to apply different stereotypes to its various Easts (an observation which, by the way, shakes the very foundations of Said’s thesis that the Western representation of the Eastern worlds and civilisations only stems from racism and ignorance). For instance, in the case of the good Easterner, there is little mention of the Japanese, who have been, for some time now, looked up to by Westerners, and who westernised their ways starting in the early years of the twentieth century, to reach a high degree of westernisation after the Second World War. Similarly, the syntagm ‘Islam everywhere’, which admittedly denotes this Abrahamic religion, disregards large areas like Indonesia and Malaysia. A fair point in this respect is made by Mahmood Mamdani in his 2002 article ‘Good Muslim , Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism’:If we can think of Christianity and Judaism as global religions with Middle Eastern origins but a historical flow and a contemporary constellation that cannot be made sense of in terms of state boundaries – then why not try to understand Islam , too, in historical and extraterritorial terms? Does it really make sense to write political histories of Islam that read like political histories of geographies like the Middle East, and political histories of Middle Eastern states as if these were no more than the political history of Islam in the Middle East? (2002, 767)

  In truth, Said’s Orientalism deals for the most part with the nineteenth century, only one chapter, ‘Orientalism Now’ (2003, 201–328), referring to the Orient in the contemporary age, still viewed as ‘a system of representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient into the Western learning, Western consciousness, and later, Western empire’ (202–3), and to Orientalism as ‘a product of certain political forces and activities […] a school of interpretation whose material happens to be the Orient, its civilizations, peoples and localities’ (203). Under these circumstances, many of Said’s assertions about Western imperialism are, in fact, residues of a reality which has been long off the map, being a corollary of his own definition of ‘latent Orientalism’, which is disseminated by ‘learned professions, the universities, the professional societies, the geographical organisations, the publishing industry [… which] built upon the prestigious authority of the pioneering scholars, travellers, and poets whose cumulative vision had shaped a quintessential Orient’ (221). Another aspect is that Said’s ‘now’ spans over a large period of time (the entire twentieth century in fact), which is, yet again, a disadvantage when discussing it from the vantage point of the post-9/11 years, which is the temporal point of reference for my analysis.

  This undertaking does not question in any way the merits of Said’s demonstration that the Orient perceived by the Occident is not real. It maintains, nonetheless, that, in the context of the global political changes since the publication of the first edition of Orientalism, and with consideration to the author’s own positioning as a representative of the Other—which renders his opinions highly subjective5—Said’s endeavour is only partly useful unless the postcolonial stance expressed by the book is overtly embraced. To put it otherwise, although Said’s thesis, that ‘the powerful representations become the ‘true’ and accepted ones, despite their stereotypical and even caricatured nature’ (Veeser 2010, 56), is valid, the imposed truths of Orientalism should be read with caution—as any other ‘truth’. In Foucault’s terms, ‘each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general polities’ of truth—that is, the types of discourse it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances that enable one to distinguish true and false statements’ (2002, 131). This ‘regime’, to which Said actually wholeheartedly adheres, holds true the idea that there is a clash of civilisations between Orient and Occident or, more particularly, between the Islamic Middle East and the West . In an interesting work on the metanarratives of this clash, Adib-Moghaddan, an expert in the international politics of the Middle East , argues that it is actually non-existent outside the discourses which impose it—a perspective that practically reinforces the Foucauldian approach to truth and, contradicting Said , seems to acknowledge the existence of two distinct discourses (produced by extremists), and not only that of a Western discourse with an imperialist agenda:The clash is exactly non-existent without the terroristic narratives spun by Al-Qaeda; it does not exist without the hate-manuals of the resurgent right-wing parties in Europe […] it is a surface effect of all that has been invented about ‘us’ and ‘them’ in all the histories, statements, books, pamphlets, dialogues that have ruminated about the inevitability of inter-group conflicts. (2011, 6, emphasis added)

  Oblivious to the existence of the discourses constructed by the other party, Said denounces their impossibility to develop as a result of the Western dominance. Adib-Moghaddan disagrees, claiming thatthe disparity of power does not imply that the East was silent, intellectually muted before, during and after the institutionalisation of Orientalism. The
other side made the ‘Occident , Europe, the West, Christianity’ available as well. Such designations of the other were interpreted, abstracted and contracted by Orientals before, during and after colonialism. (2011, 91)

  Although this outline primarily discusses Said’s Orientalism, the view adopted here is critical of this shortcoming and more inclined to embrace a more balanced stance, such as the one briefly presented above. Nevertheless, prior to introducing the Other’s designations of the Occident—which will be useful in the analysis of the literary representations of the Muslim Other constructed by Martin Amis and Don DeLillo (which are, undoubtedly, informed by Western thinking and are often accused of Orientalism)—a brief account of the way in which Said sees the evolution of stereotyping the Oriental in the contemporary Western world is also considered necessary.

  Said states that ‘the representations of Orientalism in European culture amount to what we can call a discursive consistency’ (2003, 273). He claims that, apart from the figure of the Oriental other , not much has changed over the centuries. But it is during this latest phase of Orientalism that the supremacy of the traditional powers , Britain and France, has been replaced by that of America , which, in Said’s view, has also contributed to a shift in focus as far as Orientalism is concerned. Thus, in a thorough study of Said’s catalogue, the New Historicist critic H. A. Veeser agrees with him that, while the discourse of Orientalism has essentially remained unaltered, ‘the Arab Muslim has come to occupy a central place within American popular images as well as in the social sciences’ (2010, 66). Said speaks of ‘the transference of a popular anti-Semitic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target’ (2003, 286), claiming that the latter ‘is conceived now as a shadow that dogs the Jew’ (286), an argument that he basically grounds in the shared Semitic root of the two, that is to say in the ‘traditional, latent mistrust [that] a Westerner feels towards the Oriental’ (286). In other words, an important aspect of Westerners’ distrust of Muslim Arabs is an American (and/or European) racist reaction built on centuries of negative stereotyping. Of course, no one can reasonably deny the major impact of these mental constructs, or even their degree of fictionalisation and artificiality, plentifully manifested after 9/11 , when, for a few years, virtually every bearded man with a darker complexion became a potential terrorist in the eyes of Westerners, in an unprecedented form of xenophobia , which, as Said admits, has not emerged ‘out of the blue’, but in ‘a worldly context […] both perplexingly stirred-up and ideologically fraught, volatile, tense, changeable and even murderous’ (348). Eventually, Said concedes that this centennial tradition is not static, but subject to change, in accordance with the broader context:The construction of identity—for identity, whether of Orient or Occident , France or Britain, while obviously a repository of distinct collective experiences, is finally a construction—involves establishing opposites and ‘others’ whose actuality is always subject to the continuous interpretation and reinterpretation of their differences from ‘us’. Each age and society re-creates its ‘Others’. Far from a static thing then, identity of self or of ‘other’ is a much worked-over historical, social, intellectual, and political process that takes place as a contest involving individuals and institutions in all societies. (332)

  Historically speaking, the transference of power to America and the end of the Cold War bring, in Said’s view, the demonisation of the Muslim with the considerable support of the American media and academia, which wish to replace the Soviet Union with a new empire of evil. Therefore, the media extensively employs ‘demeaning stereotypes that lump together Islam and terrorism , or Arabs and violence, or the Orient and tyranny’ (347). In the recent history of social representations , popular culture and media practices, the Muslim Arabs had been depicted as camel-riding nomads and savages, then, after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, as menacing owners of gas who keep white people/Westerners/Americans away from what is rightfully theirs. In films and television , Said argues, they were associated with lechery and bloodthirsty dishonesty. ‘Slave trader, camel driver, money-changer, colourful scoundrel: these are some traditional Arab roles in the cinema’ (287), while in the press they are constantly presented in large groups:In newsreels or news photos, the Arab is always shown in large numbers. No individuality, no personal characteristics or experiences. Most of the pictures represent mass rage and misery, or irrational (hence hopelessly eccentric) gestures. Lurking behind all of these images is the menace of jihad. Consequence: a fear that the Muslims (or Arabs ) will take over the world. (287)

  The fear of the jihadist menace, pace Said , who seems ironic in this respect, has proved justified in the twenty-first century—not only through the murderous terrorist attacks on New York, Washington, Madrid, London and more recently, Paris , Manchester, Barcelona, Brussels, but also through the developments in the Middle East , with the rise of the Islamic State and the ongoing conflict in Syria.

  Edward Said did not live to see these events (he only witnessed the attacks on the WTC), but in the afterword of the second edition of Orientalism (1995) he remarked on ‘a return in various parts of the Middle and Far East to nativist religion and primitive nationalism, one particularly disgraceful aspect of which is the continuing Iranian fatwa against Salman Rushdie’ (347). Therefore, he somehow anticipated the threat that he was deriding back in 1978. Interestingly, however, in an interview given to the American magazine The Progressive soon after 9/11, although he fiercely condemns the attacks as a ‘bloody-minded destruction for no other reason than to do it’, Said identifies Westerners as the root cause of these events: ‘they come out of a long dialectic of U.S. involvement in the affairs of the Islamic world, the oil-producing world, the Arab world, the Middle East’ (Barsamian 2001). In his words, this triggered the schizophrenic picturing of America by local demagogues who claimed to speak in the name of religion. Of course, while he is not the only scholar to have made this connection between American political intrusions in Middle East affairs and the 9/11 attacks, such a stance seems to reinforce the label of anti-Westernist, which was repeatedly assigned to him after the publication of Orientalism, and which he consistently refuted.

  In the 1995 afterword (reprinted in the third edition), Said insists that the message of Orientalism is that any attempt to force cultures and peoples into separate races ‘exposes not only the misrepresentations and falsifications that ensue, but also the way in which understanding is complicit with the power to produce such things as the “Orient” or the “West”’ (2003, 349). In his opinion, Orientalism has more often been thought of as ‘a kind of testimonial to subaltern status—the wretched of the earth talking back—than as a multicultural critique of power using knowledge to advance itself’ (336). Power using knowledge to advance itself is not necessarily bad, taking into account that power may also use force, restraints and imposition to attain the same ends. Moreover, admitting this would be equivalent to accepting the idea that the West is the more powerful part in the East/West opposition. Despite this conclusion that pervades Orientalism, recent political events show that the West is actually terrified of the so-called weaker (Middle) East , which has plentifully revealed its menacing capabilities. In addition, the existence of an Oriental counterreaction, Occidentalism, comes to reinforce the idea that, in an oppositional pair of oneness/otherness , the Self represents and reconstructs the Other , but the implications of power and hegemony may be altogether absent from the equation.

  The Occident as an Eastern Construct

  A distinction should be made between the uses of the suffix ‘-ism’ in the formation of the two concepts under the lens here. Where does ‘-ism’ as a marker of ideology , systems or movements end, and where does its implication of hatred and sense of superiority against the entity denoted by the word to which it is attached begin? Without stating it explicitly, Said negotiates between the two throughout his entire work on Orientalism: he sets out to demonstrate that Orientalism is a Western discursive practice through which knowledge produces p
ower and vice versa, but, at the same time, he often employs the term as if it were denotative of the latter definition, along the lines of racism and bigotry. Occidentalism , on the other hand, is made up of the same components, but a closer look into its inner mechanisms should prove that the order is reversed. Thus, as will be further shown, Occidentalism stems from the Orientals’ hatred of the oppressive and lecherous West , and only later, and under Said’s overwhelming influence, does it evolve into a theory in its own right.

  It stands to reason that plunging into the textual intricacies of a Western literary product should not reveal Occidentalist patterns at work there, but instead as a counterreaction to such attitudes. Therefore, one should not regard Occidentalism as a reading grid per se, since it functions as a frame of reference, as contextualisation and, ultimately, as an intertextual resource in the construction of a character considered to have such reasoning by virtue of its being an image of a socio-culturally generated product, with all the constraints and impositions that derive from that status. Thus, the necessity of approaching this category of alterity in the larger context of an analysis of Western literary texts is at least threefold. Firstly, it helps when revisiting Orientalism , as this concept has become a stigma indiscriminately applied to any Western piece of writing mentioning the East or the Easterner. The guilt induced by postcolonialist writings and subaltern studies is so prevalent that one tends to always look for hegemonic implications, whether they are there or not. Critics should stop ignoring or pretending not to hear the voice of the so-called subaltern, since their response (in writing but not only) is equally or more aggressive. Secondly, the New Historicist stance assumed here requires that the context be observed by making reference to the realities outside the text, and especially by regarding non-fictional texts as adjuvants for the literary analysis pursued, which is in direct relation to the third reason for discussing Occidentalism , namely, intertextuality . In employing this term, the reductive Genettian definition of the term as citation, allusion, plagiarism or pastiche has been degraded, under the influence of the Bakhtin dialogism (1982), to the idea that no utterance exists in isolation but is instead inscribed in an endless line of ‘oth ers’ words’ (1986, 143).